Writer Races to Victory From Way Off the Pace

Jaimy Gordon at Western Michigan University, where she has taught for almost 30 years.Credit
Erik Holladay for The New York Times

KALAMAZOO, Mich. — Jaimy Gordon’s novel “Lord of Misrule,” which won the National Book Award for fiction last month, was such a long shot that even Ms. Gordon and her publisher, Bruce McPherson, didn’t think it had much of a chance. Ms. Gordon wore an old dress to the award ceremony and didn’t bother to prepare any remarks. On learning that the book had been selected as a finalist, Mr. McPherson, the owner and sole full-time employee of McPherson & Company, a tiny press in Kingston, N.Y., only reluctantly upped the print run to 8,000 copies, from 2,000.

Ms. Gordon, 66, has taught writing for almost 30 years at Western Michigan University and lives by herself in a two-story house next to a lake here. Her husband, Peter Blickle, 17 years her junior, teaches German at the university and lives by another lake, about a 20-minute walk away. His wife goes over there most evenings with her dog and they have a glass of schnapps.

Ms. Gordon, who has a graduate degree in writing from Brown but also spent time working at a racetrack and briefly lived with an ex-convict who set fire to their apartment, has never been very conventional. She has a huge corona of springy, tightly curled hair that suggests prolonged exposure to a light socket, and a personality to match: forthright, disarming, uncensored. She is a wiser, chastened version of the reckless young female character who turns up in many of her books and never misses a chance to endanger herself.

Her first novel, “Shamp of the City-Solo,” set in a parallel universe and written in an exuberant prose style that owes as much to the 17th century as to the 20th, is about a young man who so hungers for fame that he travels to a metropolis known as Big Yolk to take part in a great rhetorical contest. Yet Ms. Gordon, partly by choice, partly by default, has for most of her career toiled far from Big Yolk — or its real-life, publishing equivalent, the Big Apple — exiled to the world of chapbooks and small presses.

“Shamp” was published in 1974 by Mr. McPherson, who had met Ms. Gordon when they were students at Brown in Providence, R.I., because no commercial publisher would touch it, and the book was both the beginning and the cornerstone of what eventually became McPherson & Company. Ms. Gordon remains very fond of the book, and said: “It’s an underground classic. That means about 25 people have read it. But those 25 really, really like it.”

For much of the ’70s Ms. Gordon was part of the experimental arts scene that flourished in Providence, attracting creative types from the Rhode Island School of Design and from the Brown writing program, then famously avant-garde. She wrote poetry, plays and a verse narrative, “The Bend, the Lip, the Kid: Reallife Stories,” about a jailbird named McMagus who is convinced that the reason men become criminals is that their penises are unnaturally curved.

“I wasn’t writing about anything in the real world,” Ms. Gordon said. “I was just writing about the language that was thronging in my brain. I didn’t write realism until I was 35.”

To write a novel that was even remotely commercial, she went on, she had to get out of Providence, where even to think of such a thing was considered a sell out, and yet even after she moved, success did not immediately come her way.

“I had to confess that I do think about an audience, and I don’t think that’s so bad,” she said. “I’m a reader, and so I know what it’s like. That power — I wanted it so badly.”

She worked for years on a picaresque, autobiographical novel that eventually became “She Drove Without Stopping,” published by Algonquin in 1990, but only after she agreed to cut it substantially. (A brief review in The New York Times called the heroine “unsavory.”) Her agent at the time told her, “O.K., Jaimy, you have to learn that you really are a small-press author.”

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

About 10 years ago Ms. Gordon began working on “Lord of Misrule” — an expansion of her short story “A Night’s Work,” which was selected for “Best American Short Stories 1995” — and was convinced that at last she had broken through. Not only is the book stylishly and inventively written, but it also depicts in loving detail an entire world — that of run-down, second-rate racetracks and the people and animals who inhabit them. She captures the patois of the grooms, the hot-walkers, the touts, and describes the horses as vividly as her human characters.

Even before the National Book Award, The Daily Racing Form called it a “gem of a racing novel.” Writing in The Times a few days after the prize was awarded, Janet Maslin said that “Lord of Misrule” was “assured, exotic and uncategorizable” and called it “a bolt from the blue.”

Ms. Gordon grew up in Baltimore not far from the Pimlico Race Course and says she comes from “a long line of horseplayers.” But she picked up most of her racing knowledge the way Maggie Koderer, the frizzy-haired, oversexed protagonist of the novel does — by falling in love with a charming, charismatic but mentally unhinged young trainer and following him around. She worked for three years at the Charles Town track in West Virginia and at the Green Mountain track in Vermont, and when she decided to enroll in a writing program, she picked Brown over Iowa because it was near Lincoln Downs, a Rhode Island track. Even today the sight of horses in a post parade can bring tears to her eyes.

Despite her enthusiasm “Lord of Misrule” failed to attract interest from a mainstream publisher. “It was like dropping it over a cliff,” she said.

Discouraged, she put it aside and years later resumed work on the novel only at the insistence of Mr. McPherson, the kind of publisher who sometimes seems more concerned with how his books look than how they sell. “Lord of Misrule,” for example, has a full cloth cover and a stitched binding, which is practically unheard of these days.

Talking about the book’s commercial prospects, he said recently, “To me, the literary idealist, those were of no consequence,” but added: “I was always eager to see Jaimy taken up by the New York literary establishment. I just didn’t think it would take so long.”

LuAnn Walther, the editorial director of Vintage Anchor, who bought the paperback rights to “Lord of Misrule” after it became a finalist for the National Book Award, said she considered it a gamble of sorts.

“I thought if it won the N.B.A. we might sell some copies,” she recalled. “But I wasn’t sure it would win. It was only published a couple of days before the awards, and nobody had ever heard of it.”

She added that some readers in her office were even a little put off by the racetrack setting, and that what really tipped the balance was some 30 pages Ms. Gordon submitted of a new novel, set partly in contemporary Germany and partly there during World War II, which Pantheon, for which Ms. Walther also acquires books, will bring out in hardcover.

Before switching over to Vintage, Ms. Gordon said, she told Mr. McPherson: “What I want right now is to see my book in an airport. Then in a couple of years everyone will figure out that I’m too esoteric, and I’ll be back to you again.”

Correction: December 20, 2010

Because of an editing error, an article on Thursday about the author Jaimy Gordon, whose novel “Lord of Misrule” won the National Book Award for fiction last month, misstated the title of another book she wrote. It is “The Bend, the Lip, the Kid: Reallife Stories,” not “The Bend, the Lip, the Kid, the Lip: Reallife Stories.”

A version of this article appears in print on December 16, 2010, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Writer Races To Victory From Way Off the Pace. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe